THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 143
Church of England, which had been the established
church of Wales for more than three centuries, lost its
privileges and was put on a footing of equality with
the native Nonconformist organizations.
In Ireland there has occurred, since the Great War, an
almost complete break with the history of the four
preceding centuries, emphasized by the division of the
island into two separate and hostile parts. Northern
Ireland, which is broadly speaking the same thing as
Ulster, is a land of Scottish and English settlers, ultra-
Protestant and heavily industrialized, with one and a
quarter million inhabitants. Since 1920 its form of
government has been dual. The British connection,
to which the typical Ulsterman is intensely loyal, is
emphasized by the retention of a dozen Members of
Parliament and by submission to Westminster in all
"matters of foreign policy and military arrangements;
the British Government also collects the taxes. For
local affairs, on the other hand, Northern Ireland has
its own Parliament, consisting of the Governor
(appointed by the King), a Senate, and House of
Commons—seventy-nine members in all—the whole
constituting a kind of half-way house between the
status of a part of the United Kingdom and that of
a Dominion.
But the three million Celts (and others) who people
Southern Ireland find in full Dominion status too
little liberty. A long and sad history goes far to
explain this, since the Englishman having figured for
centuries as the alien landlord with an alien creed
cannot easily placate the Catholic Irish peasant, though
in the last forty or fifty years goodwill on the part of
the former at least has not generally been lacking. In
December 1921 a serious rebellion, in which the long: